


Barcelona

by ahighandlonesomesound



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Missing Scene, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-10
Updated: 2015-04-10
Packaged: 2018-03-22 06:05:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3717949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahighandlonesomesound/pseuds/ahighandlonesomesound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor promised Rose that he would take her to the planet Barcelona, but then the events of Christmas 2005 got in the way. He never did take her there. Snapshots from the Tenth Doctor's life after 'Doomsday'.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Barcelona

**Barcelona**

 

_I keep my countenance,_

_I remain self-possessed_

_Except when a street-piano, mechanical and tired_

_Reiterates some worn-out common song_

_With the smell of hyacinths across the garden_

_Recalling things that other people have desired._

 

T.S. Eliot – ‘Portrait of a Lady’

 

I

 

He is in the room with the white walls, staring at the space where she has just vanished, where the portal between the worlds was only moments ago, clawing at the plasterwork. Somebody is screaming, an inarticulate howl of rage and pain, and for a moment he thinks it is a survivor. But no, there are no survivors in Torchwood One. Except him. The realisation that he is screaming jolts him to his senses somewhat, and the sound dies in his ears.

 

“Rose…” he whispers, leaning his forehead against the wall. “Please come back.”

 

He punches the wall, and little flakes of plaster tumble to the floor.

 

“BRING HER BACK!” he screams at somebody, anybody, maybe even the Universe itself. “BRING HER BACK! I AM THE DOCTOR, I AM THE ONCOMING STORM, I AM NINE HUNDRED AND THREE YEARS OLD – well,” even in his current distress, his personality remains unchanged, so he shrugs and twitches his head, “roughly. Give or take – AND I AM FROM THE PLANET GALLIFREY IN THE CONSTELLATION OF KASTERBOROUS, I AM THE LAST OF THE TIME LORDS, THE LAST SON OF THE SHINING WORLD OF THE SEVEN SYSTEMS, AND _YOU! WILL! GIVE! HER! BACK!_ ”

 

He sinks to his knees, sobbing. He sounds like one of _them_. One of the Time Lords who took the bloody stupid self-appointed name seriously, yelling at the Universe in a vain, destructive attempt to bluff it into bending to the will of a mere mortal.

He had promised to keep her safe, and even though she is with her family, and with Mickey the idiot (Mickey the brave, caring, resourceful idiot), he feels as though he has failed. And there’s another promise he didn’t keep.

 

He never did bring her to Barcelona.

 

 

II

 

Travelling across the Void between the universes is virtually impossible. In the glory days of Gallifrey it had taken all sorts of advanced technology and months of preparation. Now, with the Time Lords all but gone, it is incredibly difficult to do, and impossible to do at all without permanently damaging the fabric of reality. The Doctor’s accidental jaunt across the Void with Rose and Mickey had almost left the TARDIS completely drained of power, and that little trip had been made easier by the tear in reality caused by the Dalek Void Ship. Now, with that particular crack sealed, even sending a message across would completely burn up the heart of the TARDIS unless he could find another flaw in spacetime and pray it led to Rose’s universe.

 

Of course, the heart of the TARDIS is the Eye of Harmony, and the Eye of Harmony is a star…

 

And that particular train of thought is why the TARDIS is currently in orbit around a dwarf star. The Doctor had gone to one of the lifeless galaxies, the breeding-grounds as TARDIS engineers had once called them. This was where stars had been harvested to be turned into TARDIS cores, and the Doctor knows that he can harness the energy of one to use as a power source for the TARDIS for long enough to send a message across the Void.

 

The Doctor pulls a screen towards him and glances at the readout. Enough power in this star to send a short message, or so he hopes. He sets up the 3D recorder and stands in front of it. Behind it, a wire runs along the ground of the control room and into the communications array. He has been orbiting this star for weeks, sending little feeder messages, trying to tap into Rose’s subconscious mind using the TARDIS’ telepathic circuits (after all, she is more a part of the TARDIS than anyone else who has been on board bar the Doctor himself. She held the heart of the TARDIS within her, and even though it was for just a few brief moments, the TARDIS does not forget), sending her northwards to the Scandinavia of her universe and a place called Bad Wolf Bay.

 

As those weeks have passed, he has agonised over what he will say, wondered how she will respond (setting up a two-way feed isn’t hard, not for a Time Lord). Even now, he isn’t sure about the last bit. It’s right, he knows that, it’s true and beautiful and painful, but he does not know if she feels the same way.

 

He steps away from the recorder for a moment, and stands in front of a mirror. One last practice, just to shake the nerves.

 

He takes a deep breath.

 

“Rose Tyler, I love you.”

 

 

III

 

 

As the TARDIS departs from another London Christmas overshadowed by aliens, the Doctor slumps in a seat in the control room. He’s getting lonely, travelling around by himself. Donna Noble was right, he _had_ been scary back in that basement killing the Racnoss. He worries that he may be becoming another half-mad Time Lord, keeping himself apart from the other intelligent species of the universe. He has been too long without a friend to share his journeys with. At least Donna had temporarily distracted him from Rose, and from the message that had cut out at the most vital moment.

 

He never brought her to Barcelona, and he never told her he loved her. Perhaps he can rectify at least one of those by going to Barcelona to honour her memory. That seems like a plan. But first, oh first, a little bit of adventure. Nothing too dangerous, just something to cheer him up after this godawful Christmas.

 

 

IV

 

 

The Doctor has only been in London once since the Battle of Canary Wharf. That had been at Christmastime, and London is always different during the festive period. This is his first time back on an ordinary working day and the minute he steps out of the TARDIS it hits him like a sledgehammer. The noise, the fumes, the combined smells of the river, the cigarette butts, the drink, the flowers and the people… it is a smell unique to London in the early twenty-first century. Not that long ago, there were nowhere near as many cars, never mind the fact that a more ethnically-homogenous population had meant less variety of food smells. And the Doctor knows that soon there will be a smoking ban and the river will be dredged again and there will be new congestion laws and a cycling initiative sponsored by a mayor who looks like he has stepped out of a cartoon and the sights, sounds and smells of London will change again.

 

He should know, he’s been there.

 

But no, this is it, the real deal. This is Rose’s London.

 

He stands there for goodness knows how long, head bowed, taking it all in. Every second, every beat of his twin hearts, he misses her. Her loss left a wound and he does not believe he can ever be the same again. He still hasn’t been to Barcelona; every time he thinks about it the sorrow overwhelms him and he puts it off for another day. He should really go.

 

But not today. He has a Plasmavore to catch.

 

 

V

 

 

He knows that he has been impatient with Martha. That no matter how smart and kind and enthusiastic she is, she can never be Rose, she lacks the ability to ask the pertinent question that makes everything fall into place, the ability to make him feel calm and safe. He still sometimes thinks he can feel Rose’s comforting hand in his. He has caught himself weighing Martha up against Rose more times than he cares to remember, and he knows that such behaviour is unfair to the former. Even so, Martha’s decision to leave completely blindsides him. It is not until he is alone in the TARDIS that he realises that her explanation for why she left him contained a between-the-lines admission to having feelings for him. With hindsight, he can see that he should have noticed that from the beginning, but he had spent all his not-saving-the-Universe time and energy on feeling sorry for himself. Self-absorbed. Thoughtless.

 

 _Is there anyone who I have met whose life I have not ruined?_ he wonders. _Or am I nothing but a selfish madman leaving a trail of destruction in my wake?_

 

He is so lost in thought that he forgets to engage the temporal shielding before the TARDIS takes flight.

 

 

VI

 

 

The Doctor’s brain is working faster than he can ever remember thinking before. He is in the Library, with a woman who claims to be from his future and a team of archaeologists who are depending on him to keep them alive. That team has already been whittled down significantly, and he has lost Donna when he vowed he would never lose another of his friends.

 

 _Saved… saved… saved…_ the word keeps echoing through his head. _How could the people in the Library be saved if they disappeared? Transported through a portal to another part of the Universe? But the Library AI doesn’t have that kind of tech, it’s just got a massive hard drive, the teleporters and the security system, and most of that hard drive must be taken up by digitised books and the donated likenesses of the dead… dead, but, but… Donna can’t be dead, she was teleporting out! The teleporters, something in the teleporters…_

 

He tries to imagine what the Library must have been like the day the Vashta Nerada struck. People panicking, screaming, running for the teleporters as the shadows came alive and attacked them. But the teleporters didn’t have a long enough range to get offworld, and the Library’s security protocols would have locked down all the exits to the spaceports. So they were stuck, with nowhere to teleport to bar other parts of the Library, and a massive backlog of people in the teleportation system. Given that, how on Earth could the library AI have saved them? Its memory processors must have been under incredible amounts of stress, trying to handle all the data caused by people pinging back and forth through the teleporters.

 

 _Data_ , he says to himself, _data! That’s it! The AI was speaking literally! It_ saved _the consciousnesses of everyone in this building to its core hard drive!_

 

He suddenly realises that he’s been jabbering fragments of his thoughts aloud for at least a minute, and River Song is catching on to his idea. He can see it dawning in her eyes. He leaps into action, heading for the nearest computer. He will not let another of his friends be taken away from him to live out their life in another world.

 

 _I’m coming, Donna_ , he vows. _I’m coming_.

 

 

VII

 

 

“Why don’t you ask her yourself?” asks Donna, her eyes fixed on something over his shoulder.

 

He turns around slowly, almost afraid of what he will see.

 

He sees Rose, looking just as he remembers. Beautiful, wonderful Rose. He begins to run towards her, knowing that whatever happens afterwards this is it, this is the moment and it is so, so _right_.

 

 

His Rose.

 

Words fail him, he is overwhelmed by a mixture of emotions; joy and love and sorrow all blended together into bittersweet perfection.

 

Then, suddenly, there is pain. Pain and blinding light, and he falls to the ground a few yards from her feet.

 

 

VIII

 

 

He stands on a beach in another world.

 

He stands on a beach in another world, facing himself.

 

Or almost himself. Almost himself, but more human. A human lifespan, one heart, no regeneration, but all his memories, feelings and experiences. The kind of Doctor that Rose deserves, and this new Doctor’s need for Rose is greater. He has just explained that to her. This new pseudo-him is like he was in his last regeneration, born in fire and war and attempted genocide – because he’s not so stupid to think the Daleks have been destroyed for good – and he needs Rose to teach him how to live.

 

Rose is asking how the last sentence of his transmission would have ended, such a long time ago. He knows the answer, as does his other self. The Doctor knows what he must do.

 

“Isn’t it obvious?” he asks, knowing that his other will tell her the full answer.

 

So he stands there watching as Rose kisses his other self and hopes that the pain he feels does not show on his face. He can feel Donna’s presence beside him, and knows that she understands exactly how he feels. That in itself is another problem – Time Lord memories in a human brain can only end one way – and he knows that he will have to deal with it soon. But for now he stands on the beach and feels his hearts break inside him. He knows that he will never be the same. Rose will move on and find some form of happiness with his more human form, and he will go back into the TARDIS, wipe Donna’s memories and be left to wander the Universe alone.

 

Alone, always alone. Friends come and go but he will always be alone, regeneration after regeneration.

 

“Goodbye, my love,” he whispers, so quietly that only Donna hears. He sees the look on her face, knows she wants to tell him that it’s unfair and stupid and to hell with his kind-of-sort-of-clone, he should be with the woman he loves. He hopes she won’t say it, because he doesn’t want his resolve to break.

 

This is the end of their story. He can feel it in his bones.

 

 

IX

 

 

The Doctor is shaking as he steps back into the TARDIS and shuts the door. The last of his cast-iron certainty is draining away leaving an empty feeling in the pit of his stomach and the odd sensation that all of his nerve endings have been scraped raw. He is disgusted at the temporary insanity that overtook him on Mars, having the arrogance, the effrontery, to think he could change a Fixed Point without consequences. He has been travelling alone for too long, and is slipping into dangerous patterns of thought and behaviour.

 

Sometimes he thinks he sees her, on a crowded street usually, although once or twice he has been sure he has seen her turning a corner ahead of him in one of the TARDIS’ many corridors. Maybe he is going mad.

 

Maybe losing her is part of why he tried to change a Fixed Point. If he could do that, he could do anything. He could bring her back. Such selfishness. Calling himself the Doctor was a promise, and he has to live up to that.

 

“Never cruel nor cowardly…” he mutters, shaking his head.

 

He is starting to suspect that the Ood are right; his song is almost sung, his time is almost up. But before he returns to the Oodsphere and answers the telepathic call that he can hear subtly echoing through the song of the Universe, he will make a few detours.

 

He will go to Barcelona in Rose’s honour. But first he needs to travel to some interesting places to cheer himself up so he is in the right mindset for that little pilgrimage. Elizabethan England, perhaps. And maybe Hawaii.

 

 

X

 

 

He wasn’t lying when he told Wilf that regeneration meant that he disappeared while a new man walked away with all of his memories. Would the new him, the man he met, the man who forgot the number of children who died in Gallifrey’s destruction, feel the same way about losing Rose? He has no idea. Maybe he wouldn’t, and maybe that would be a relief, but the Doctor has grown used to the gaping wound in his soul left by her absence. It has become a part of him, and part of what drives him, and losing the constant ache in his gut would feel like dishonouring her.

 

Her face may be the last he ever sees in this body. He staggers towards the TARDIS control console, leaving behind him London in 2005 with Rose before she knew him and the psychic projection of Ood Sigma who had come to sing him to sleep and into a new life.

 

But no, he remembers, as his body spasms – _this is going to be a big one_ , he tells himself – there is still one more thing he must do. He grabs onto the console and sets course for Barcelona. The planet, not the city. His last act will be to pay his love tribute. Maybe his whole life since he met her has been a way of paying her tribute, being the Doctor she thought he was, doing the things she would think were right and just and compassionate.

 

As the TARDIS takes flight, starting to spin through time and space, the Doctor’s hand begins to glow.

 

Feeling tears prick in his eyes, he thinks of Barcelona, and of Rose, and of all those wonderful people he has grown to love: Jack, Mickey, Martha, Pete and Jackie, Alonso, Jenny, Donna… so many.

 

“I don’t want to go,” he tells the Universe, his voice sounding small and frightened in his ears, and he knows it is futile.

 

It is of Rose, wonderful, glorious Rose, his beautiful brave Bad Wolf, that he is thinking when the regeneration energy overwhelms him.

 

 

XI

 

 

The Doctor staggers to his feet, still woozy after the regeneration, muttering to himself, trying to work out the important details. New limbs, new hair – not ginger, but lots of it, is he a girl this time around? No – and a new voice. His memories are slightly blurry, but he is certain there’s something important. Something he was doing, somewhere he was going… what was it…? He is aware that he is thinking aloud and then suddenly he realises, as part of the control room explodes, that the TARDIS is in freefall.

 

“Ha!” he cries triumphantly, pleased to have worked it out so quickly right after regenerating. “Crashing! Ha! Woohoo! GERONIMO!!”

 

And so the Doctor moves on, to new adventures, new dangers and a girl who would wait cumulatively for half her life across multiple timelines for the raggedy madman in the blue box. His adventures will take him further than ever before, into pocket universes, alternative versions of reality, cracks in time and even outside the Universe to a little bubble of spacetime that became a graveyard for TARDISes and Time Lords alike.

 

But he will never go to Barcelona.

 


End file.
